Conscious
by Firiel-Earth'sDaughter
Summary: While working on the Red Book one night in Bag End, Frodo falls very ill and is tormented by memories of the past. Quite dark. Post-Quest. No slash.


The title and quotations that precede each section are taken from the poetry of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Originally from Shrewsbury in England he was killed in action the last week of the First World War, at the age of 25. 

Not surprisingly for a book so deeply informed by Tolkien's own war experience, the echoes of war poetry, especially Owen's, found in the LOTR are striking. I really love Owen's poetry so you'll have to excuse the self-indulgence involved in working his poems into this fic! (If you want to read more poetry by Owen try the website of the 'Wilfred Owen Association'.)

The quotations, in the order they occur, are taken from Owen's 'Insensibility', 'The Show' and 'A Terre'.

Conscious.

_. . . whatever moans in man_

_Before the last Sea and the hapless stars;_

_Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;_

_Whatever shares_

_The eternal reciprocity of tears._

It was one of the smaller rooms in Bag End and was situated near the back. The drooping branches of a young willow swayed gently outside the single window. Its movements cast dazzling patterns of dappled sunlight around the dark room. On summer mornings when there was a breeze the splashes of light would dance gaily winding their way about the room darting, expanding, contracting and colliding with each other in a whirlwind display of diamonds. Sam had often asked that Frodo allow him to cut back the willow as it blocked out so much daylight, but Frodo had begged that the branches should remain. Not just for the pleasure of watching the gleaming patterns of the light that were thrown up against his wall as he lay in bed each morning - but for the unspoken reason that he also relished the illusion of security given by the cascade of leaves that seemed to cut him off from the world. 

Here, enclosed in this way, he would work for hours on end often on the Red Book and sometimes on other scattered projects that interested him. Progress on the book proved exhausting. His mind worked in bouts of fevered application, his thoughts racing this way and that - at a speed far greater than his injured hand could keep pace with. The large old oak desk was situated under the window; it was a beautifully carved piece: a gift to Bilbo from an aunt. Now, however, its intricacies of design were lost beneath the books, papers and notebooks that were piled high on top of it. Only a small space remained clear for the business of writing. Nearby a series of shelves groaned under the weight of many dozens of books. More tomes in piles of precarious height leant against the walls and desk. These piles were so many and the room so small that it was difficult for anyone except Frodo to navigate about it without stumbling into one of them. And all around was the musty odour of old parchment, a smell which Frodo found pleasant but which both Rosie and Sam thought stifling.

Tonight he had worked later than he had intended. In the days that had gone before he had worked solidly through the hours of darkness, driven on by an urgent and irrepressible energy. In his heart he doubted whether it was the excited, enthusiastic vigour of one who pursues a goal. It seemed closer to the anxious and fevered energy given suddenly to a man who is being chased, allowing him to run with a speed that outstrips his strength. The result of this prolonged marathon was that he had been utterly worn out and had lain unsleeping in bed throughout most of the daylight hours – not that that had perturbed him particularly - it was the dreams of the dark night-time that he feared.__

Whatever his intentions, it was not until the small hours of the morning that he found himself able to tear his mind away from the onward rush of memories to consider the time. Rubbing his tired eyes he stirred and looked about the room. Strange black shadows leapt up against the wall and stirred threateningly in the candlelight. They seemed to grow, consuming all they fell on: like hungry mouths gaping, deep and ominous. The walls of the room seemed to lean inwards; devouring the space within them. He shivered uncontrollably and turned away. His head ached and he endeavoured to focus his eyes on the page before him. 

It was very cold. 

Not yet. He wouldn't go to bed yet.__

Suddenly he stopped writing. His whole body tensed itself. A feeling at once strange and terrifyingly familiar took hold of him. Without his noticing it, his breathing had become faster, accelerating into short wheezing gasps. The quill trembled for an instant, straining, poised above the parchment, before the nib was smashed into the paper with a suddenness that snapped it in two. Simultaneously Frodo heard a choking cry escape from his throat. His head jerked uncontrollably as an icy shaft of pain stabbed through his skull and upper back. He clutched his hand to his neck, pressing into the wound in an attempt to numb it into submission. The pain intensified. His whole body was now shaking and he was aware of beads of sweat welling and freezing onto his skin. 'Oh please, no!' he heard himself gasp as he felt the icy threads of pain weaving themselves into him 'Not now - not again! Please!' The last word tore out from his throat in a desperate cry that filled all the room and rang about the house; repeating itself again and again in his mind; getting louder and louder; beating, beating, beating into him; rising to a crescendo and . . .

He fell forwards onto the desk. For a moment he did not move.

The clamour in his head had stopped to be replaced by a silence even more deafening. The all too familiar white wall of Silence that rose up between him and all the earth. Alone. Cast adrift on an endless ocean of pain that swelled, died down, and rose again through and beyond the comfort of measurable time. Its moods fitfully changing: but its terrible bleak expanse never ending. 

No sun save to sear him. No wind save to toss him. 

No Light save to taunt him. No Dark save to consume him.

He was alone and there was no deliverance.

His breathing had slowed again. He drew his hand from his neck. A sticky mixture of blood and water glistened in the fading candlelight. He stared at his hand for a moment, as one entirely unconnected with it, unsure of what to do. From the end of his torn third finger downwards it was soiled with scarlet. The blood and water gathered in the creases of his palm, picking them out like rivers on a flat plain. The fevered light of the waning flame made the hand appear to throb as its flickering rays shuddered, spluttered and went out.

He pushed himself up into a standing position and with burning eyes tried to gauge the distance to his bed. It was barely a few feet. Tentatively, he began to shuffle, groping blindly in the dark. Suddenly and without warning a great dizziness overtook him. His head was spinning violently. He threw a look to the side, clutched at the chair, missed and fell forwards onto the cold stone floor.

For a second he froze there, paralysed, listening in cold dread that he might have been heard. There was no sound. The house lay sleeping under the blanket of dark all about him. Frodo stretched his hand out in an attempt to drag himself up again but, as he did so, a more violent pain than that which had first assailed him laid hold of him and began to wring him mercilessly. His eyes failed as he felt the horror rear forwards and break upon him. It pounded him into the ground; he choked; felt a salty liquid well up in his throat. 'O Elbereth' he heard himself cough as his reason fled. 

The darkness around flowed in, filled everything and he knew no more.

_******************************_

_My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,_

_As unremembering how I rose or why,_

_And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,_

_Grey cratered like the moon with hollow woe,_

_And pitted with great pock and scabs of plagues._

He lay awake staring blindly at the fume-choked sky. He could barely see his surroundings any longer. They were cloaked in a brown haze, a stifling smoke reeking from the only thing he was fully aware of any more. Fire. The horror threw itself with overpowering ferocity against the frail defences that still held his will intact, renting, tearing, battering itself into him. Slowly it bored inwards. It would not burn him whole but kept him for the jeering half-promises of life and death. A great wheel of flame. It spiralled round and round unceasingly, winding past, present and future into one unending reality of Pain.

He clasped his hands tightly together. The raw flesh around the torn stumps of his nails sang with pain. He could hear Sam moving slightly in the dust beside him. He could only be a few feet away; but how many miles it seemed - miles beyond all count. The blazing wreath before him barred the window of his mind and he could no longer see.  He stared heavenwards into the thickening gloom, willing his gaze to dwell past that dancing ring of flame. Dimly discernable were the great lower limbs of the mountain's bulk, pitched above him, black against the murky sky. __

Great tremors heaved through his form. He curled himself tightly, clasped hands to his chest. Alienated from himself the only aspect of his body that he was aware of any longer was the waves of pain that tore through it, riding one behind the other, rushing through him; trying to bear him downwards. He felt an over powering need to cry out - even if there was only the darkness to hear him. But he could not. The black shadows that wound their way all around grew and choked his voice. He was suffocating. The tension in him clasped and squeezed at his fume filled lungs. He could barely breathe, only gasp faintly as his throat rattled and he drowned in the foggy gas. When he coughed out he felt as if his bones would shatter. The salty taste of his own blood soaked his dry mouth.  __

He had no fear of what would come afterwards; he was not allowed to even think that there might be an afterwards that would come. Just Silence. Endless inescapable Silence mocked at him through the steady passing of the hours. Yet even the leering nothingness seemed preferable to this relentless agony. He could not live like this shifting endlessly, suspended and buffeted backwards and forwards between torments. He would go mad. Was he mad already? Maybe he wanted to go mad. He groaned inwardly. He did not know what he wanted. He did not trust himself any more. He did not even know which thoughts were his own and which were the Ring's. 

But perhaps there was no longer any difference. Perhaps somewhere on the long torturous trek through Mordor, without even needing to put it on, he had lost himself to It - had given himself over utterly to its allure? A thick bitterness rose up inside him and he felt himself disgusted and sickened with the taste of his own being. He was utterly lost. And did he loathe himself too much now to mourn even the passing of his soul?__

Horrors his own imagination could never have conjured drove into his shattered mind. He clawed vainly for some faint light of hope to fix his will on and to strive for. But none came. In the suffocating blackness, memories, even those that would only serve to taunt and frustrate, seemed desirable. He could not even remember Sam's face, which he had looked upon barely a few hours before. Was Sam beside him at all? He tried to turn himself to see and gave an involuntary gasp as an agony of pain drove him back against the ground. He no longer believed in death for himself – only torment. What was he doing here anyway?

He shut his sore eyes tightly trying to chase away the question, but it assailed him with renewed strength, searing itself on his consciousness. Why was he going on? Before he could shut his ears to it he heard the answer. And the reply that rose out of the depths of his soul appalled him because he knew it was true: he didn't know the reason any more. There was no phantom of past joy, friendship or love that he could conjure to justify his actions. Gandalf, Aragorn, the Shire, Bilbo, Pippin, Merry - he knew the names but no further recollection remained to him. Desolate and alone, in dark and emptiness around and inside him, the truth he had never acknowledged before seemed terrifyingly clear. It was all was a lie. All he had ever striven for and hoped for was nothing.  A black chasm opened up before him and his mind could perceive no other truth. 

He clenched his fists convulsively and dug them into his closed eyes. He choked and from somewhere deep inside him came the desperate sob. 'Please! Go away! Go away - '. The words caught in his arid throat and the terror before him merely laughed at the weakness of his voice. The jeer fell upon his senses like a hammer blow and he felt his will torn from him. He gasped - drowning in a growing sea of despair. 'O help me! Please!' he heard the dying embers of his heart beg to he knew not who or what. 'Please!' There was a pause and it seemed to Frodo that the world stood still. He clutched blindly trying to grasp anything that might stop him falling into the abyss that opened its hungry jaws before him. Yet even as it seemed to him that his mind had been utterly overthrown, the dark nothingness seemed to recede, fade away and die into his burning brain. Barely daring to breath he opened his eyes slowly.  The pain and terror that had haunted his steps for days remained, but the moment of unutterable helpless despair had passed for the time being. Battered and weary beyond hope, he was still there and the thin thread that still bound his will to him remained intact. __

***************************

_My soul's a little grief, grappling at your chest,_

_To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased_

_On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds._

_Carry my crying spirit till it's weaned_

_To do without what blood remained these wounds._

Dimly from somewhere far away he heard a voice approaching. Something jarred against his aching shoulders. The voice grew nearer, tearing apart the veils of the darkness that surrounded him. Warm morning light flowed in and seemed to wash away all thoughts of terror. The unyielding surface of the arid plain fell away and he felt himself sinking into cool familiar sheets. Twittering of birds rode in on the dancing sunbeams.

'Frodo, Mister Frodo!' 

The voice was charged with an anxiety that smote his heart. With a supreme effort of will he lifted his hand, searching the space before him.

'Sam?' he whispered thickly, unable to open his eyes. 

He felt his cold hand caught tightly between two larger, warm ones. 

He couldn't remember half of what followed. Sam's relieved stream of words dropped past his ear, heard but not understood. His unsteady mind was aware only of their sound, ebbing and flowing gently against it. Dim, incomprehensible yet comforting: like the far away sound of soft waves, falling on the shores of a vast Sea.  


End file.
